Terracotta flask in the form of a
scribe

This terracotta figure of a scribe depicts him
as a very fat man with huge legs, sitting on the ground with one
knee drawn up and a papyrus roll spread across his
lap.

The figure is a
bottle, one of a group of finely made red-ware vessels, sparingly
decorated with black paint, that date to the Eighteenth Dynasty.
The vessel is not an ink container, as Egyptian inks were kept in
dry form. Like his identity, his function, once obvious perhaps, is
now a mystery.